Kamchatka and in the Aleutians were saved in the same way — which is not to say that the death toll was small. Until that Sunday morning in May, the great Japanese quake of 1923 reigned in record books as the greatest killer of its type in all human history with one hundred thousand victims.
The record books would not be revised this time, because the Chinese People's Republic was in no rush to acknowledge the magnitude of its ill luck. For that matter, while the great majority of the seaquake victims were Asiatic, few were Chinese. Chang Wei 'lost' many records and arranged a hundred deaths to prevent the disaster from becoming generally known.
Chang wondered occasionally how it was possible that a series of waves could demolish an undersea fleet so completely. He might have understood had he known how seismic P-waves could kill fish, even trigger demolition devices affixed to secret weapons. It had been Chang's own designers who, in their zeal to protect a staggering breakthrough, had converted a rough crossing into an appalling catastrophe in the deep.
On Nuhau, Boren Mills stood at a safe distance and watched the first tsunami climb, a grey-white wall of water and coral fragments, onto Kikepa Point. At the time he felt only mind-numbing awe. Much later he would remember the event in exultation.
On Santa Rosa Island, Eve Simpson stood with NBN gawkers behind protecting glass and announced her disappointment. In its long traverse of the Pacific the tsunami had lost its punch, its capacity to overpower; and so it earned Eve's scorn.
At San Simeon the beach was several klicks away. Quantrill elected to stay on the mountain rather than make the cross-country run with other diehards to coastal bluffs, there to watch the waves thunder in. Quantrill much preferred Marbrye Sanger's proposition; had seen the slabs of rye bread oozing with ham and cream cheese as Sanger packed a meal for two; tried with no success to deny his anticipation of the outing she'd suggested. Quantrill would have said he entertained no illusions about Sanger. Any young gunsel with two flawless kills would have intrigued the hunter in Sanger. He saw himself as legitimate quarry, not sex object, and intended to be caught.
Chapter Sixty-Six
Yale Collier interlaced fingers behind his head, leaned back, studied the holo display on the wall. 'You're asking me to put our entire west coast in a state of siege merely on the basis of two Indian overflights?'
'After a thorough analysis, Mr. President, yes,' said the General, biting into the issue. He looked at the scatter of soft-faced civilians who shared the war room, wishing Collier's cabinet posts had been filled with more plain soldiers than Christian soldiers. Their very presence was irregular, but the President referred to them as his Chiefs of Civil Staff. And close coordination with civilian agencies had never been more vital than now.
'Those were manned aircraft, experimental Indian recon jobs modified in China to disperse a common flu virus. They were one-way flights, probably sea-launched. That's a hell of — a great deal of trouble, sir, for a non- lethal viral weapon. And if one of the pilots hadn't spotted a nice muddy field near Yuba City, he couldn't have landed alive.
'His aircraft was rigged with explosives and his canopy release had been disconnected. Obviously they intended both planes to disintegrate in midair. One did. The pilot we captured is a suspicious sonofa — gun, lucky for him and for us. So we now have metallurgical analysis and a live pilot to tell us the Chinese, not the Indians, wanted a temporary epidemic along the coast from Coos Bay to San Francisco. That suggests we can expect enemy troops there by the end of the month.'
'You're certain the pilot wasn't an Indian who happens to speak Chinese,' the President prompted.
'He's about as Indian as a fortune cookie,' said the general.
The Chief of Naval Ops: 'We've put every hunter-killer team we can muster on intercept sweeps out of Oahu, off the Andreanofs, and in the Guatemala Basin. I don't see how the Sinos could mount such an operation without our detecting it. Frankly, I expect to find 'em sneaking some big troop subs north through the Middle America Trench. We'll be ready.'
'You'd better be,' said the Secretary of Health. 'That flu aerosol is already dispersed. By the twenty-eighth, there won't be an aspirin tab or a roll of toilet paper in Northern California.'
'Taking the worst case,' said the Secretary of Defense.
'Somehow they hit our beaches around the Oregon border. Do we nuke them or don't we?'
Secretary of State: 'I hope to God we can begin civilian evacuation today.'
'You talk as though the decision to nuke had already been reached.'
'No, sir, I think Health and Interior will agree with me that whatever the decision, we've
'Meanwhile,' said the general, 'we pump flu vaccine into green Fourth Army troops and move our artillery in place around the bays.'
'And be ready to lift it again by chopper,' nodded the Secretary of Defense. “This whole Sino operation could be a blind.'
The CNO: 'The Latin-American scenario, Mr. Secretary?'
Defense shrugged. 'That or a massive resupply of Florida, which could swamp what's left of Second Army. If the SinoInds have immunized an invasion force against their paranthrax, it could happen. We're not going to overlook anything.'
Defense was wrong. We had overlooked the possibility that an invasion force had been so thoroughly destroyed that even its own leaders had no way of knowing whether any of it survived.
Major General Karel Lansky, at the far end of the conference table, sighed and put away his floppy discs. Until now he'd hoped the agenda would get as far as the new developments with First and Third Armies in Kazakhstan, Lansky's own bailiwick. It was too early for conclusions, but damned well time for an opinion: in western Sinkiang, rear echelons of the Chinese People's Army were beginning to panic.
Nothing in satellite or RUS espionage reports suggested an Allied strangulation of supply routes to the CPA, yet the movements of troops and materiel in Sinkiang were in mounting chaos. One RUS brigade had already speared back into Semipalatinsk to find that Sino trucks and ACV's had run short of fuel. Rocket artillery, mortar rounds, fuel, food, everything that qualified as heavy cargo: the CPA was starving for it. The American Third Army had whiplashed under the Sino flank as far as Alma Ata, turning the Sino rear at Lake Balkhash. George Patton would have lanced on into Sinkiang. For once, our hesitation proved wise.
Lansky did not trust the briefings he'd had as liaison with the RUS high command. The Russians ostensibly thought that some civil disturbance — perhaps a full-fledged revolution — was shaping up in western China, though no Chinese radio messages supported such an idea. But, said the Russians, if it had happened to the USSR in 1985 it could happen to anybody!
Lansky gathered evidence and kept silent among the Russians; if his own suspicions were correct, he would be wise to hide them from his Russian friends. Lansky intuited that the CPA was as politically reliable as any military entity in existence. If an internal panic broke out in the rear echelons it was unlikely to have an ideological basis. But there were weapons, both chemical and biological, that could dismember the staunchest warrior cadre.
Lansky knew that the RUS Central Committee had sworn they would unleash no biological warfare weapons without prior agreement among allies. He also knew that the Sinkiang anomaly had all the earmarks of madness, or of plague. Unless the RUS had broken its word by secret dispersal of some terrible weapon in Sinkiang or Tsinghai, Lansky had guessed awry.
He had, and he hadn't. Though a Mikoyan attack bomber had provoked the beginning of the end with conventional smart-bombs against a Tsinghai laboratory, the RUS was for once innocent of intent. Ultimately the Chinese Plague was China's own dragon, come to breathe death on her people.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
